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The Interrogative Void: Sluicing and Wh-Ellipsis in Forensic Inquiries
In the public hearing rooms of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London, the Iraq Inquiry (2009-2016), chaired by Sir John Chilcot, conducted a forensic post-mortem into British foreign policy. As committee members cross-examined senior intelligence coordinators, diplomats, and cabinet ministers, transcripts revealed a persistent syntactic pattern: sluicing. In theoretical linguistics, sluicing describes a specialized form of ellipsis wherein an interrogative embedded clause is stripped of its entire sentential content, leaving behind only the solitary wh-word ("They knew a dossier had been modified, but would not disclose who"). In official forensic scrutiny, this grammatical figure serves as an acute diagnostic marker, isolating the exact point where institutional memory fractures into deliberate evasion.
The rhetorical force of sluicing derives from its ruthless economy. An antecedent clause establishes that